“I know.” She looks up from her tea and into my eyes as she has looked into them once before. “But this is the worst thing.”
There is nothing I can say. I am not on the verge of shouting, but her words resonate with my shouts of last night. I notice now the atmosphere of unreality that has surrounded me since first I heard that my wife was dead. Only the sound of my shouts can disperse it, and only for brief moments. It is the dullness of the pain. It is the worst thing.
“At least you know that she loved you,” Our Heroine says, and the thing is abruptly worse. “She didn’t just leave you behind of her own free will.”
I gulp deeply of my tea and hold the liquid in my mouth until it has lost its heat. She is speaking only of the infidelity of Prescott. Unless—
“I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just said that,” she blurts. She is speaking only of the infidelity of Prescott.
I swallow. “It is copasetic,” I say. “Prescott was not good for leaving you of his own free will.”
Emily. She was being held against her will by Surt. I had to save her. I remember this. As I emerged from the dark cavern my eyes were stung by the whiteness of the snow, and it was thus that I did not see the blackguard who had crept behind me even when I turned at the noise of him. There was no pain, but I was dizzy and I fell, and my face was clumsy from the snow. I still remember this.
When my eyes could see again at all, the light was blurred, but I saw Emily pulling rubber from the face of Surt. I saw something of his face. Then my daughter, turning me over and pulling me to my feet, spoke to me. The infernal reporter was there with her. “Let’s just get him to your house,” she said to my daughter, and then she said something to me.
“Are you all right, Mr. Ymirson?”
But I knew that she should not be spoken to, so I held my silence.
At first I just stood there in the Thing Room like an idiot, not saying anything, waiting for the father and son to finish chatting with their buddies. I figured they were probably discussing whether or not I’d get permission to see the real inner sanctum, and I didn’t want to ruin my chances by saying anything stupid. But after a few minutes passed, and the son just got up and walked off down one of the side corridors without so much as a glance in my direction, I realized that I was gonna have to fend for myself for a while.
The room was like Grand Central with all the comings and goings; I felt pretty out of place the way everyone else was bustling around me. It was like the projector reel was being cranked back too fast and I was just about the only still thing in the frame. The woman and the old guy in the corner were pretty stable, too, I guess, and that’s probably what drew my attention to them. But even the men in their little squatting groups kept getting up and shifting places, circling around each other… Splitting off and forming new circles. Everything just had this real restless quality to it. Frenetic. I had to walk across the room to shake the sensation.
The woman wasn’t dressed like a native. This pissed me off a little, since I’d been so fervently assured that I was going to be the only outsider in here, but I decided not to make a big deal of it. I leaned up against the wall a few feet away from her and the old dude. He looked kind of familiar to me, but I figured it was probably just the way he reminded me of a generic old-school movie star. He had the traditional big-jawed good looks of a Kirk Douglas, or a Charlton Heston, or a Burt Lancaster. She seemed pretty engrossed in her conversation with him. I was so busy trying to figure out where I knew him from, though, that it took me over a minute to realize they were speaking English.
“But the second occurrence…” she said. Her voice was sort of shaky, like music from a sun-warped cassette. She might’ve been crying. “Well, I’m really not certain. I suppose—if I were to try to trace my own motivations in the matter—that I was attempting in some sense to demonstrate to myself—or, rather, to both of us—that the first occurrence hadn’t in all actuality—Well, that I’d been in control. But I now apprehend the fact that I hadn’t been. And that renders it all the worse, doesn’t it? At least that’s the way that all of the threads seem to resolve, to my mind. I’m not really great with interiority, though, so perhaps I’m reading it wrong. But I’m just rambling now. What’s your opinion?”
“I have said before and I shall say again that it is not your fault. You cannot be held to blame for a dog’s rabid turn. Hmph. You… I do not know what else to say. Dog and hound and cur. I must think for a moment.” The guy’s accent was surprisingly subtle considering that he must have been in his late thirties—at least—by the time Vanaheim was discovered. He was a quick learner, I supposed. Or else he was an Icelander, which would have explained his modern dress-style. I had trouble telling the accents apart.
“I’ve encountered you before, haven’t I?” I noticed that her voice had lost its quaver. And then I noticed that she was addressing me. “Yes, yes; I know who you are. You’re that Hamlet boy from Denmark.”
I should have known I couldn’t avoid my fans, I thought. Then I looked at her full in the face for the first time, and I realized that I actually did know her. She looked completely different outside of the library, though, with her hair down and her glasses removed. I really had met her in Denmark. She’d been researching Hamlet, too.
“Yeah,” I said, pushing myself away from the wall. “Oh, hey. I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Hmm… Your middle name wouldn’t happen to be Michael or Elmo or Melvin, would it?” she asked me. Her eyes were a little red. The old guy seemed to have drifted off into his own little world.
“No,” I said. “It’s Green. Why do you ask?”
“Green? Hmm… Well, no, that simply won’t do at all. I was attempting to contrive an apposite anagram for you, but I’m afraid you’re short the “M” and the “L” needed for anything to do with Hamlet. But why don’t you sit down and join us? Perhaps I can think of something while we talk. My companion and I were just discussing Vanatru theology.”
With faux-Vanatru spirituality sweeping Hollywood, and everyone from Madonna to Cher overcoming fears of red-paint reprisals by boldly sporting designer fox-fur coats and accessories, and with even fitness guru Billy Blanks tossing aside Tae Bo in favor of Refurserkir-inspired “Fox Boxing,” what could possibly be more chic than dating the daughter of the man who discovered the place? That’s what Bean Day pilgrims were wondering this week when Hollywood heartthrob Nathan—no, I promised.
I tried not to worry about my father, safely in Connie’s care now, as I made my way downtown. Most of the Bean Day tourists were gone by the time I arrived; they’d already moved on to the more outskirtish sites, like the park where Prescott had almost married Gerd, or the burnt-down farm where Surt had buried his forged Viking weaponry. This meant that none of them were around to bother me for an autograph, but it also meant that none of them were around to tell me if they’d seen Garm. I’d decided to concentrate on Garm, while my other problems brewed in my brain. At least he was out here somewhere, running about—not being held captive by Refurserkir or some inept ring of antiquities thieves. All assuming I could believe Connie, of course.
Intellectually sexy. The snow still fell, but somewhere between here and home I’d stopped being angry about it. I supposed it sounded like something he might say. He’d learned most of his English from me.
“In Vanaheim, ‘snow’ is so all-around, it has many words,” he told me once (I translate from the original Vanaheimic). “When its color cannot be seen and it moves as if with life in it, we call it vatn. When it is so cold that it is hard like stone, we call it ís. Only when it is soft and white do we call it snjór.”